Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Yesterday I run across a wonderful little utility I had never heard of and I wanted to share it with you. The name of this tiny MS-DOS utility is Clip and what it does is paste what comes down the pipeline to the Clipboard.

Here's how to use it. Just fire a Command Prompt and type whatever command you want to redirect to clipboard followed by a pipe (|) and the 'Clip' command:

dir c:\windows | clip

ipconfig /all | clip

netstat -an | clip

echo copy this to clipboard for me | clip

Clip is available on any recent Windows version out-of-box and has no dependency. So it doesn't rely on Perl nor on Powershell as others stated.

It can be used from a Powershell environment though:

PS C:\> Get-Process | clip

PS C:\> Get-Service | clip

PS C:\> Import-Module activedirectory

PS C:\> Get-ADComputer | clip

Powerful, isn't it? What it does from a Powershell point of view is to take the output out of the pipeline and put it in the Clipboard. So if we pipe the Clip command to Get-Member to see what kind of object is passed, we see that there is none: